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Your First Day With Claude: The Four Things To Set Up Before You Type Anything

By Nigel Guy · 1 min read

Most people's actual first move is to type a question straight into a blank chat. That's not wrong exactly, but it means every one of the next fifty sessions inherits none of the setup that would have made them faster. Four small decisions, made before the first real question, change that.

The four, in order

1. Tell it about yourself, briefly. Role, current focus, one or two preferences. This is what memory hooks onto — do it before anything else so every later answer benefits.
2. Start one Project for the thing you actually need help with, not a loose chat. A project keeps related context together instead of scattered across five separate conversations.
3. Connect exactly one tool, the one you'll genuinely use this week — not everything available. An unused connector is a permission granted for nothing.
4. Pick a default model on purpose. Fast for quick back-and-forth, flagship for anything needing real reasoning. Decide this once instead of guessing every time.

Do them in this order because each one makes the next more useful — memory makes the project smarter, the project makes the connector's context relevant, and only then does the model choice actually matter.

What to skip

Skip reading every settings page before you've asked a single real question — you'll understand the settings better once you have a live use case. Skip connecting more than one tool on day one; add the second once the first is actually part of your routine.

Guardrails

• None of this replaces reviewing what it gives you. Setup makes sessions faster, not automatically correct.
• Revisit your connector choice after a week — if you're not actually using it, that's useful information, not a failure.
• A good first day is fifteen minutes of setup, not a research project.

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